There was no stopping the rush. The middle distance was cumbered with
bodies, but the rest surged on, breaking against and over the barricade
like an ocean wave. Sturges Owen fled to the tent, while the men were
swept from their feet, buried beneath the human tide. Hay Stockard alone
regained the surface, flinging the tribesmen aside like yelping curs. He
had managed to seize an axe. A dark hand grasped the child by a naked
foot, and drew it from beneath its mother. At arm's length its puny body
circled through the air, dashing to death against the logs. Stockard
clove the man to the chin and fell to clearing space. The ring of savage
faces closed in, raining upon him spear-thrusts and bone-barbed arrows.
The sun shot up, and they swayed back and forth in the crimson shadows.
Twice, with his axe blocked by too deep a blow, they rushed him; but each
time he flung them clear. They fell underfoot and he trampled dead and
dying, the way slippery with blood. And still the day brightened and the
robins sang. Then they drew back from him in awe, and he leaned
breathless upon his axe.

"Blood of my soul!" cried Baptiste the Red. "But thou art a man. Deny
thy god, and thou shalt yet live."

Stockard swore his refusal, feebly but with grace.

"Behold! A woman!" Sturges Owen had been brought before the half-breed.

Beyond a scratch on the arm, he was uninjured, but his eyes roved about
him in an ecstasy of fear. The heroic figure of the blasphemer,
bristling with wounds and arrows, leaning defiantly upon his axe,
indifferent, indomitable, superb, caught his wavering vision. And he
felt a great envy of the man who could go down serenely to the dark gates
of death. Surely Christ, and not he, Sturges Owen, had been moulded in